OpenAI acquires TBPN, the buzzy founder-led business talk show

OpenAI has acquired the popular talk show TBPN – Technology Business Programming Network – making this the AI ​​giant’s first media company acquisition. The show will report to OpenAI’s chief political officer, Chris Lehane.

Hosted by former tech founders John Coogan and Jordi Hays, TBPN is a daily live show broadcast for three hours on YouTube and X, focusing on technology, business, AI and defense.

The show has acquired a cult following in Silicon Valley, a safe space where industry power players can speak candidly and be questioned by fellow insiders. The show has a reputation for being a kind of sports center for the tech industry — a place where top tech CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg, Satya Nadella, Marc Benioff, and, yes, Sam Altman, come to shake things up, respond to the news of the day, and occasionally make some news of their own.

TBPN will live on as its own brand, which will help OpenAI scale. Not that help was necessarily needed on that front; TBPN has grown into an empire that is on track to rake in more than $30 million this year The Wall Street Journal.

OpenAI already has its own podcast for long conversations with the people who build technology at the company.

OpenAI will also leverage the founders’ “great communications and marketing instincts” beyond the show, according to OpenAI’s head of AGI implementation, Fidji Simo, who said TBPN will “bring AI to the world in a way that helps people understand the full impact of this technology on their daily lives.”

Simo went even further, noting that TBPN’s prowess is necessary for an atypical company like OpenAI, where “the standard communications playbook simply doesn’t apply.”

She said TBPN will have editorial independence and “will continue to run their programming, choose their guests and make their own editorial decisions.”

Still, the takeover could provide some pause. After all, OpenAI is a valuable AI lab on the brink of an IPO and buying a buzzy talk show that often discusses the company and its competitors. And once the deal closes, TBPN will operate under OpenAI’s strategy team and report to Chris Lehane, the man who coined the term “vast right-wing conspiracy” as a tool to deflect press control of the Clinton White House.

Lehane, who has been described as a master of the “political dark arts,” is also behind the crypto industry super PAC Fairshake, which has spent hundreds of millions on anti-crypto candidates in the 2024 elections. He joined OpenAI that same year and has since whispered recommendations into President Trump’s ear for sweeping and controversial policies, such as preventing states from regulating AI and relaxing environmental restrictions that could delay the construction of data centers.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who said in a social media message that TBPN is its favorite technology program, seems to believe that the acquisition will not change TBPN’s commentary and even criticism of the company.

“I don’t expect them to make it easier for us. I’m sure I’ll do my part to make that happen by making stupid decisions every now and then,” he wrote.

TBPN now sees the takeover as a means to do more than just comment.

“While we have occasionally been critical of the industry, after getting to know Sam and the OpenAI team, what stood out most was their openness to feedback and their commitment to getting this right,” Hays said in a statement. “Moving from commentary to real impact on the way this technology is distributed and understood globally is incredibly important to us.”

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